A new way to make sure your employees are safe

As a Health and Safety officer, we are forever looking for ways to keep our employees safe. I read an interesting article and it got me thinking of a new way that you can do this...

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A new way to make sure your employees are safe

As a Health and Safety officer, we are forever looking for ways to keep our employees safe. I read an interesting article and it got me thinking of a new way that you can do this… Staff wellbeing programmes. It makes sense because the choices your employees make at home, can affect their health and safety at the workplace, where you have an obligation for your employee's wellbeing.

Read on for our five steps to create your wellbeing programme and take better care for your employees' safety.

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Fulfilling your health and safety obligation has never been this easy or efficient!

Step 1:Identify the top five wellbeing concerns of your employees.
You can do this by sending a survey to your employees, asking them what their top five health concerns are (Eg Drugs, alcohol, fitness or lack thereof, emotional wellbeing, diet, UV protection etc). Summarise the most common factors.

Step 2: Map out the objectives.
Use the factors that your employees identified, summarise them according to the most common ones and just use the top five. Decide which factors could affect your employees in the workplace. Your wellbeing programme needs to address these five factors. These are your objectives of your wellbeing programme.

Step 3: Assess how your wellbeing programme can address these concerns.
For example, if it is a drug abuse concern, this can easily affect the way your employees work and they can put others at risk of accidents happening. Your wellbeing programme could address this issue by sending out messages to your staff on how drug users can get help. It can be as simple as educating your staff of the dangers of drugs in the workplace.

Keep reading for your last two steps. I've even included two more examples for you.

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Is your designated smoking area at least 5m away from non-smoking employees? If not, then you better get R50,000 ready to pay a non-compliance penalty

Step 4: Decide how you are going to roll out this wellbeing programme.
Do you need other managers to assist you? Do you need to find experts on the topics to come and speak to your employees? Decide which channels you are going to use to get your message across (newsletters, staff bulletin board, lunchtime chats etc)

Step 5: Implementation
Now that you have an outline of the objectives of your plan, and how you will address each issue, you are ready to implement it.

If you're serious about your employees' safety, get the other department heads involved. Ask them what wellness programmes they think you should be doing. Here are two examples of what your health and safety wellbeing promotion plan can include.

Two examples of what to include in your health and safety wellbeing promotion plan

Hold lunch chats on how to deal with stress, healthy eating or quitting smoking;

Always have non-alcoholic drink options at your work functions. This shows your employees they don't always have to drink. This could tie in with a lunch chat about alcohol abuse.

Now that I have given you a broad outline of how you can approach this new idea, see how you can apply it in your workplace and keep promoting health and safety at work. Remember to put measurements (such as employee surveys) in place to see if your programme is working!

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